The year 1601 in literature involved some significant events. [edit] Events - Lancelot Andrewes becomes Dean of Westminster.
- Thomas Overbury meets Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, and they become firm friends.
- Tirso de Molina enters the monastery of San Antolín at Guadalajara, Spain.
- Tommaso Campanella, imprisoned in Italy for revolutionary plotting, is judged insane and spared the death penalty. He is sentenced to life imprisonment, and begins to write The City of the Sun.
- On February 7, the Lord Chamberlain's Men stage a performance of Shakespeare's Richard II at the Globe Theatre. The performance is specially commissioned (at a 40-shilling bonus) by the plotters in the Essex rebellion of the following day, February 8. The plotters hope that the play, depicting the overthrow of a sitting monarch, will influence the public mood in their favor. (The plot fails.) Actor and company member Augustine Phillips is deposed by the Privy Council on February 17.
- Philemon Holland publishes his translation of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. When he composes Othello in the next year of so, Shakespeare exploits the book for references, including the "Anthropophagi" and the "Pontic Sea."
[edit] New books [edit] New drama [edit] New poetry - Robert Chester - Love's Martyr. The volume also contained fourteen poems by other hands, including:
- Gervase Markham - Mary Magdalene's Tears
- John Weever - The Mirror of Martyrs, or The Life and Death of Sir John Oldcastle
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